Better to concentrate fixing deficiencies by adjusting an unhealthy diet, although it might make sense to take some specific individual supplements if you have specific dietary requirements or some very specific health condition.

There's enough studies to suggest overdosing on certain vitamins can cause more harm than good, so unless you have the means and commitment to avoid overdosing, why risk daily multi supplements, just eat your damn veggies!

better to fix diet. just eating a bunch of meats and vegetables should provide all vitamins in abundance. important: many vitamins are fat-soluble, therefore, sufficient fat should be consumed with the vitamin-containing meals.

there are some ideas out there that say vitamin supplementation can lead to some vitamins out-competing others for receptor use, which can lead to weird imbalances, so it might even be harmful. but probably no humans ever died from it.

for reference, brute has gone an entire month without green vegetables before he started getting weird, dull headaches. eating a few green vegetables fixed them. eating fatty meat also seems to help, maybe the same vitamins or minerals are in both green vegetables and red meat. in any case, it's probably totally sufficient to eat vegetables once a week to prevent deficiencies.

I've switched to a liquid multi as well as liquid fish oil because of the absorption problem scott mentioned. My doctor recommended splitting the dose and taking it AM and PM, but I'm doing IF so I can't.

When you get a prescription or OTC medication, it says the dose per pill on the bottle. The FDA regulates quality control standards ensuring that each pill in each bottle is within +/- x% of that dose. There is no such regulation for vitamins and supplements. A bottle containing pills of so many mg of vitamin D may have anywhere from zero to several times the stated dose. With herbal supplements the situation is even worse. You can buy a bottle of ginseng at the drug store and be fairly certain that its grass clippings and paper.https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/ ... lers/?_r=0

On the other hand, every single human is a mutant and we each have different relative deficiencies of specific pathways. Since its impossible to know, short of clinical scurvy and beriberi, which deficiency you are susceptible to, it isn't unreasonable to supplement. But the key word is "supplement." They shouldn't replace food.

On a vegetarian diet, I've opted to supplement with a multi vitamin, D3, flax oil, creatine and protein. When I'm especially motivated, I'll add vegan DHA rather than hoping for ALA conversion from the flax oil, but the expense is annoying. I also limit soy to 1-2 servings a day, due to concern over the phytoestrogens. Were I vegan, I'd also pay careful attention to B12 and calcium.

Certainly a vegan can survive without everything but B12 supplementation, but there is room to do better, IMO.